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Scientists identify four personality types
Personality type tests are hugely popular, though if you ask working psychologists, they’ll tell you the results are little better than astrological signs. But a new study, based on huge sets of personality data representing 1.5 million people, has persuaded one of the staunchest critics of personality types to conclude that maybe distinct types exist, after all. In a report published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois identify four personality types: reserved, role models, average and self-centered
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Finding Gear for Teens to Try Out Hobbies
Get a group of parents of tweens and teens together and soon enough the conversation turns to how busy they all are shuttling multiple kids among multiple activities, clubs and sports. There are advantages to being part of a team, a theater group or a volunteer organization, and many young people thrive on the connections they develop there. But having a hobby can be deeply valuable, too, and research has shown that adolescence can be a fruitful period for passions to develop. Hobbies — creative passions pursued for their own sake — can be a way to counterbalance a culture that demands overwork and overachievement, or an antidote to technology and news-driven anxieties. Dr. Ronald E.
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A Spendthrift 5-Year-Old? Researchers Say Yes
For some people spending money is very stressful. For others, it’s fun—even therapeutic. Might children share these same tendencies? Scholars use a scale to measure adults’ propensity to spend and save. On one end of the scale are tightwads, or people who feel distress when they spend money, and on the other end are spendthrifts, or people who spend a bit too freely. In the middle are unconflicted people who don’t have strong emotional reactions to either spending and saving.
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How to Live With the Pain of Loss, Without Going Numb
What is the best way to deal with a loss? Loss is one of life’s most excruciating emotions, because it involves pain that to some degree will never go away—what you have lost will never come back. Often, people try to suppress their feelings, or close themselves off to situations that could lead to loss again. That doesn’t work.
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Google is using peer pressure to help cities save energy
With climate change on many minds, cities around the world have affirmed their dedication to improving sustainability efforts. To help with that, Google recently unveiled the Environmental Insights Explorer, which overlays emissions data and efficiency analyses atop a city’s Google map. So far, the tool’s beta version has been rolled out in five cities: Buenos Aires, Argentina; Melbourne, Australia; Victoria, Canada; and, in the US, Pittsburgh and Mountain View, California. The project will collaborate with more cities to bring additional data into the fold.
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Researchers have identified a new personality type. Chances are you’ve had it
Whether it’s the ancient Greeks trying to divine one’s character from the stars, or modern surveys that purport to tell you what type of person you are, experts have struggled to come up with a trustworthy personality test. Now, the largest study of its kind suggests people reliably shake out into four major personality types—including a brand new one that, surprisingly, most people will possess at some point during their life. “I think this is an extremely impressive study,” says Richard Robins, a social psychologist at the University of California, Davis, who has been researching human personality for decades.
